infoTECH Feature

Should You Upgrade to Solid-state Storage Systems? Consider Skyera's Guidelines First

While adding solid-state storage systems to a network might seem to be an easy and straightforward task, there are nooks and crannies with numerous loopholes which can develop into unpredictable complexities with significant cost penalties. It is to this effect that some corporations have taken the pain of composing and posting guidelines. One set of guidelines, issued by Skyera Inc., a company with a reputation in solid-state, storage and networking field, however remains exemplary.

Skyera is against the idea of investing in expensive and time consuming network infrastructure upgrades chasing after a mere two high-speed network ports given by solid-state appliances. On the contrary, customers should adopt flash storage systems that have an embedded network switch to rule out the necessity of an expensive hardware overhaul. This carries the benefits of minimizing purchase and operational cost to one lower than that of buying regular hard drive systems.

"As industry excitement continues to build for the performance attributes of solid-state storage systems and the cost of flash devices begin to drop, many organizations are looking to jump head first into adopting this technology without giving any thought to the impact on their existing network," said Dr.Radoslav Danilak, Skyera CEO.

"While this might not be a problem for those who believe in maximizing system performance at any cost, most organizations need to consider the effects of adding solid-state storage systems into their network environment and calculate the added investment and complexity that will be required in making such a wholesale change."

The ability of solid-state storage systems that can integrate 1GbE switches express into appliances will enable private point-to-point interconnections between servers and the device hence doing away with the need to upgrade to 10GbE or 16GB Fiber Channel alternatives. The approach frees up the network pots hence allowing combinational matching of the 1GbE ports to match the performance of physically upgraded networks.

Skyera has produced the Skyera Skyhawk, an appliance purposed to bring a revolution in the adoption of enterprise flash content. The solution’s native technology is based on 9/20 nanometer consumer Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash which sells at three dollars per gigabyte before compression and de-duplication.

With the right planning, solid-state storage systems will sufficiently meet a company's performance needs while cutting down on both upfront costs and TCO. Flash appliances like Skyhawk are able to bring impressive performance to modern day demanding applications and workloads while achieving true price parity with HDDs making flash storage an excellent choice for the data center.

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